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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4542020" data-attributes="member: 63272">This "less options" nonsense has to die.  In 3e, most of those 'more options" were mechanically nonviable.  They were terrible choices to make.  They existed solely because of the "free" multiclassing system but without a heavy dose of rules mastery, novice and even experienced players could easily make mechanically terrible characters.  And the means did not exist in the core books to fix it.  Fighter/wizard?  Eldritch Knight didn't come close to making that basic staple workable.  It was years and splatbooks before 3e ever made that an actual mechanically viable build, and many would claim it never really got there.  I was certainly never happy with its representation in 3e, as the fighter/mage was always among my favorites.  Just because you could make a barbarian1/rogue1/fighter1/wizard1/sorcerer1/cleric1 does not mean it is anything approaching a viable choice.  The very fact that a player could easily fail at the most basic element of an RPG game, character creation, simply by choosing poorly among the choices given is pretty serious design failure.That doesn't happen in 4e.  Out of the box, you simply can't make terrible choices built for your class.  Sure, you could, if you qualify, buy a feat that does nothing for your class, but its clear the feat does nothing.  It is not clear in core 3e that Alertness is a useless feat, that nimble fingers is a waste of the limited feat options for a rogue (despite being designed for a rogue), its not clear that the rogue has to hit the ground running with his feat selection if he is ever going to reach the best rogue feats, which lie at the end of feat chains.  3e didn't have an amazing array of options.  Sourcebooks were mostly about finding ways to do basic options in better mechanical ways, not present wholly new options.  Some fancy new caster is really just a flavor of an old caster only crafted into its own class.  The concept is still the same.  A hundred ways to do wizard/cleric with only 2 of them mechanically superior does not a wealth of options make.3e had 11 base classes.  Of those, certainly the fighter was the weakest and the sorcerer was artificially restricted and inferior to the wizard.  It took sourcebooks to correct this.  But nevermind that.  Add to that 16 prestige classes and you're done.  Sure, you can multiclass into thousands of combinations by purely statistical analysis, but only a tiny fraction of those combinations represent mechanically viability.4e has 8 base classes.  Only 3 less than 3e and well within the range of other PHBs from the low of 3 through 1es 5 base and 5 subclasses (and that was it).  It has 31 paragon paths and 4 epic destinies.  For those counting, thats 43 to 27 in favor of 4e versus 3e.And in 4e, you can't accidentally make a bad PC.  All those classes are balanced, all those paragon paths.  And the rules, powers, and options are in place to play the whole game level 1-30.  That is a complete game with a wealth of options, far more options than any edition of D&D before 3e and no mechanically terrible options like in 3e, where the core actually encouraged you to play multiclassed casters and give up caster levels.</blockquote>

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